The egghead and the hourglass

Book of the week

Arthur Miller: Benerican witness

by John Lahr

(Yale £16.99, 264pp)

Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman, which so accurately portrays the cruelty of aging and the tragedy of lost dreams, is performed almost every day of the year somewhere in the world.

Until its 1949 Philadelphia premiere, Miller had been a struggling hacker who worked in a factory assembling beer crates. But with the advent of fame, says the well-known American theater critic John Lahr, author of this captivating, well-researched biography, “he influenced a pipe and landed the role of a public intellectual.”

Since then, 11 million copies of the lyrics have been sold. Miller made the character of traveling salesman Willy Loman—who has “gone mad,” Lahr writes, “by his dream to win and his fear of losing”—a metaphor of the American psyche, with its machismo, competitiveness, push and motive.

The role was based on Miller’s father, Isidore, who owned the Miltex Coat & Suit company and employed 800 people. He lost everything in the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Broke, Isidore found that he “couldn’t let it happen again.”

Due to the perceived left-wing slant of Death Of A Salesman, the House Un-American Activities Commission sniffed around Miller, determined to find the blemish of communist ties.

Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “incessant propaganda” of the time led to ordinary, honest people being threatened, mistreated, and shunned—reminding Miller of the Salem witch trials of 1692 and inspiring him to write The Crucible. Capturing the “political paranoia” of the time and speaking to any age or society under repression, it received 19 curtain calls on its opening night in 1953, and the script sold millions of copies.

Interesting as all this is — Miller is a staple of A-Level English courses — what I’m really only interested in is Marilyn Monroe, who Miller met in 1951, when he was lured to Hollywood to write screenplays.

When he saw Marilyn at a party, Miller was beaten by “twisting her hips.” When they shook hands, “the shock of her body movement shot through me,” he later said.

This was all too unsettling for the studious, Puritan playwright, known as “a brooding young man burning with all the iniquity of the world.” Miller had also been married (unhappily) since 1940 to Mary Slattery, a lapsed Catholic from Ohio. Miller’s Jewish parents were so horrified that Arthur had a pagan wife that they threw alarm clocks at each other.

With Marilyn, Miller, normally “rigid with inhibition,” was stirred by physical passion. He was mesmerized by her damaged beauty, “a wanderer haunted by the doom that was her shattered family legacy”—the schizoid mother, the orphanage, and the foster homes. Miller rather deadly believed he could be her savior in a way that Joe DiMaggio—Marilyn’s husband for short, “a monster of jealousy and emotional abuse”—wasn’t. Even while married to baseball hero DiMaggio, Marilyn “had fantasized that Miller was part of her manifesto. destiny’, which would give her faith as a serious actress. “She was endlessly fascinating,” Miller said. “There was no conventional bone in her body.”

Until the 1949 Philadelphia premiere, Miller was a struggling hacker who worked at a factory assembling beer crates

The tabloids whipped up gossip about “The Egghead and the Hourglass.” Marilyn, always looking for a father figure, called Miller, ten years older than her, ‘daddy’.

It was Dad’s job, he discovered, to bolster her fragile self-esteem—which proved impossible. “She was like a broken vase,” Miller would say. “It’s a beautiful thing when it’s intact, but the broken pieces are murderous and can cut.”

When Mary found out about Marilyn, Miller was flung away. He lived in Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel and, “starved for sexual release,” was happy to marry his mistress in 1956.

“I’ve finally come alive,” Miller assured his parents—did they set their alarm clocks? – but Marilyn soon suffocated. If she was against, she was immediately convinced that she was not loved. It was a catastrophe. “I comforted her,” Miller said. “She had a bomb in her. Set her on fire and she would explode.’ Sometimes, and I’ve been there, guys, a guy just wants to watch TV, not indulge in scenes.

The first thing the Millers did was travel to England to film The Prince And The Showgirl, starring Marilyn and Laurence Olivier. Marilyn arrived at London Airport with 27 suitcases and husband and wife were installed in a country house near Windsor Castle. Four thousand fans lined the Strand to see Marilyn arrive with Olivier for a press conference at The Savoy.

During the filming, there was a lot of antagonism between the stars. “Okay, Marilyn, be sexy,” Larry said, and she would take offense.

She found her opponent condescending. He found her superficial and demanding, with her private chef, hairdresser, bodyguard, make-up team, masseur, publicist, and acting coach, Paula Strasberg. Having to provide constant support was an unsustainable burden. Marilyn’s “addiction to pills and drugs has beaten me,” Miller said.

The usual portrayal in all biographies is that of Marilyn as talented, misunderstood, helpless – “all Charlie Chaplin’s heroines in one.” The unique perspective given by John Lahr is that we see marriage from Miller’s angle, with Marilyn a tyrant of sorts.

Due to the perceived left-wing slant of Death Of A Salesman, the House Un-American Activities Commission sniffed Miller, determined to find the blemish of communist ties

Things took a turn for the worse during the filming of The Misfits, in 1961, written by Miller and directed by John Huston. Since he had married Marilyn, she had had three breakdowns, three suicide attempts and, having had a number of abortions in the past, was now unable to conceive. Her many miscarriages were traumatizing.

“People who succeed are loved because they exude a magic formula to ward off destruction and death,” Miller reasoned. Willy Loman couldn’t. Marilyn Monroe couldn’t.

She died in 1963, under circumstances that are still disputed. By this time, Miller was with Inge Morath, a stills photographer. Their daughter, Rebecca, would marry Daniel Day-Lewis. Miller died in 2005 living off the lavish proceeds of those long-ago plays.

One of his last assignments was to review my biography of Laurence Olivier, which he aptly called “a portrait of sunlike radiance, a passionate and monumental celebration of genius.” So how come I haven’t sold millions of copies?